Mr Greyfield Will See You Now: A Review of Magnate
So, how has this month been treating you all? Personally, I had a sunny getaway with the missus towards the start of July, and it was absolutely lovely. My only disappointment was that we couldn’t take a recently purchased board game with us to learn, because let me tell you, this thing is an absolute monster. So, after we’d both got nicely tanned and had a slightly uncomfortable photo session on a boat trip, we returned home and cracked open Magnate.
It might not surprise you to hear that I’m a massive nerd, and not only do I love board games, but I’m also a big video gamer. Of the types of video games I love, building games are top of the list. I could (and have!) spent hours building the perfect city in Cities: Skylines 1 and 2. I’ve spent literal days of my life making theme parks, hospitals, colleges, and museums. So, when I saw the game Magnate and realised it was a city development game, my interest was naturally piqued. I hauled my poor, battered credit card over to Zatu and purchased myself a copy.
When I saw the sheer size of the box, I was a bit daunted. It’s in the same league as Gloomhaven, Slay the Spire, and Eclipse. But me and my wife soldiered on and started reading the instructions. Now, the game does come with a pre-built tutorial, but we aren’t fans of tutorials in board games. In our opinion, they’re a bit like maths teachers: they give you some easy questions, then say, “Right, do your worksheet,” and the questions on there might as well be in another language. So, instructions it was. Despite its frankly intimidating size, we didn’t struggle too much, to be completely honest. At its core, the game is very simple.
You start with the ‘core city’, then add in six separate plots of land with multiple building locations, and then you start building your stuff on it. Some plots on those larger squares give certain bonuses to the buildings nearby, such as residential or industrial boosts. Conversely, they might have the exact opposite effect depending on the tile itself. For example, you may try to build residential property by some docks that people just might not want to live by. Once built, your budding building will need tenants to actually earn you money, and that’s when those little boosts or banes come into play. If it’s got a nice green upwards arrow for the building you’re trying to rent, you get to add pluses to your attempt to fill it, whilst a nasty downwards red arrow will take them away.
In order to fill the building, you will have to roll some dice. You can add a cheeky little advertisement boost if you like, forcing one of your dice rolls to be a five, and that’s basically your whole turn.
Nitty Gritty Stuff
That all sounds very simple, and at the heart of it, it really is that straightforward. You look at the available space and spend some cash to build a building. The building can be residential (either a single house or an apartment building), commercial (a little shop or a huge mall), industrial (a small company or a big chemical plant), or finally, an office block (a little one or a big one). Each of these buildings provides a certain amount of rent per turn.
Each building can hold a certain amount of tenants, with the bigger versions naturally holding more. Getting tenants into your buildings relies on other buildings nearby. For example, for houses, you can roll dice equal to the number of shops or office tenants (whichever is lower) in the vicinity, which encourages you to strategically place each building. This all sounds great, and it is… for a while.
Because if economics has taught us anything, it’s that the more someone buys something, the higher the price gets. This is where Magnate gets just a little bit clever (or even more clever, really). Remember earlier when I said you can advertise to make it easier to get tenants? Well, if a certain amount of those advertising tokens aren’t used each turn, or if too many are used, it will either affect the price of land (due to interest in the area) or push the economy closer to crashing entirely.
Now, the game doesn’t end until the market has completely crashed, and the person with the most money in their pocket at the end of the game wins, which is not necessarily the person who has the most full buildings. With this in mind, we can get to the final action you can take on your turn: selling buildings you own. The amount you get is dependent on many different factors, such as the current price of land and the number of tenants it currently has. But if you do sell, this too will send the market towards crashing. So, you have to walk a fine line between getting lots of buildings and tenants (so you get a lot of money each turn) and, in the immortal words of Kenny Rogers, “You gotta know when to hold them, know when to fold them” for the biggest payout. That’s because your buildings will be worth a whole lot less when the market crashes at the end. Of course, if you sell a building, you’ll no longer earn rent from them.
Tips and Tricks
The tips I have for this game are pretty good, at least in my opinion, so open up those word receptors and pay attention.
- Early on, houses are your friend. All the other pieces rely on them. I looked at my wad of money in the first turn and thought, “Well, I can afford industry here immediately.” But when I looked at the nearby residential (pre-built on the core section), I realised I would never have been able to get the tenants.
- That also leads into my next tip: before building, count how many dice you will get in the ‘add tenants’ phase for that building. It’s pointless building a really expensive office block that will net you loads of rent each turn if you can’t get the renters to fill it.
- Don’t be afraid to save for a few turns to build the bigger version of a building. The game has no definitive end, so saving for a few turns can really pay off.
- Pay attention to the renters’ pool. Each turn, new renters will be added to the pot. If you want to build a chemical plant, make sure that the pool has enough industrial tenants to fill it.
- Don’t be afraid to use the advertisement tokens. They can be bought for 50k when you take the action to get a few for free anyway.
- Pay attention to what your opponent has played. Just because they are your opponent’s tenants doesn’t mean they don’t add dice for you when you’re trying to fill your buildings. Teamwork… or rather, co-dependant capitalism!
2-Player Review
First of all, let me say that Magnate is beautiful. The pieces are well made, you even get a toy digger, and the fact that one of the companies you could play as was “Greyfield Industries” meant I could keep looking at my wife and saying in my suavest tone, “Mr Greyfield will see you now,” much to her horror. That alone is worth some points in the bank!
But this game played only okay as a two-player experience. I can definitely see this being a blast with three or more, as the land becomes harder to get and there are fewer special tiles for you to build on. As a two-player game, it just barely scratched my city- building itch. The crashing economy aspect definitely brings a great deal to the table, and I love that the game doesn’t have a definitive endpoint. Especially given that in a lot of the games me and the wife play, we end up adding a few extra turns just to feel our strategies finally come together and start really working for us.
Each piece is very well done, and the corresponding tile has perfect areas on them to sit them in, which just scratches the OCD receptors of my brain perfectly. Will this be a contender for “let’s leave this out on the table and play it after work each night”? Probably not. But it will definitely be put in the rotation as one we crack out, and we have a friend who routinely joins us for games who will probably adore this one.
